OCHI presents Opening, a solo presentation by Los Angeles-based artist Alex Heilbron. Heilbron’s paintings explore the tension between the logical order of systems and the fray of their collapse. Drawing upon design histories and the visual flotsam of our collective cultural cache, Heilbron manipulates found images at a granular level. The resulting digitally mediated forms are translated into vinyl stencils and layered onto canvas, where poured, rolled, and brushed paint create epidermal surfaces that are both meticulously handwrought and governed by technological constraint.

This exhibition functions as a minor survey of the evolution of Heilbron’s practice to date, moving from her early, exclusively hand rendered compositions to more recent works where digital means of manipulation and production play a central role. Regardless of the process by which they were composed or crafted, each work exists in the slippery space between digital interface and human touch. In Faithful Mirror, 2019, Heilbron cites the central motif of a German bank advertisement, moved by the way the graphic seems to imply movement yet maintain stillness. This paradox of suspended motion and collapsed time is a persistent theme in Heilbron’s practice.

The vacancy of this analytic space reveals Heilbron’s expansive research into the ornamental trappings of the psychopolitical. Embedded in the works are fragments of historical design: Koloman Moser, William Morris and Mary Quant all make elusive appearances. Heilbron is interested in the ways in which the ideologies or personas of the referenced makers seep into her paintings. It is this latent echo that ties such disparate associations (a palette inspired by Paris Hilton's early 2000s handbag or a public painting commemorating the assassination of JFK) into a broader dialogue about the evolution of aesthetics and politics.

The paintings are inscriptions of labor, rigorously physical and intellectual efforts, such that they seem imbued with a certain selfhood, their frenzied surfaces working up a blush.

______________________________________________

Alex Heilbron (b. San Rafael, California) received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and studied with Rita McBride and Christopher Williams at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany. Her work has been exhibited internationally including at as-is, Meliksetian Briggs, Temple Projects, and LAXART in Los Angeles, CA; Claremont Lewis Museum in Claremont, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art in Santa Barbara, CA; The Modern in Fort Worth, TX; Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver, BC, Canada; Anne Barrault in Paris, France; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany; and Moscow Museum of Art in Moscow, Russia. Heilbron received a Pollock-Krasner Grant for 2023-2024 and a Helen Frankenthaler Painting Award in 2020. Her work has been featured and reviewed in publications including The Brooklyn Rail, artnet, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Glasstire, Paper City Magazine, and Santa Barbara Independent. Heilbron lives and works in Los Angeles, California.